The aim of the challenge is to build a community of developers designers, and data analysts who can turn the raw data of “civic health” into beautiful, useful visualizations, enabling our communities to be better understood and made to thrive. Excellent, eh? Read on!

The Data 2.0 Summit hosted thought leadership discussions on cloud data — how companies are building on top of a long-term foundation of social data, open gov data, business intelligence data, and customer data. The summit provided an ideal launching pad for the challenge, since those we addressed are passionate proponents of using data for a purpose.

Leading up to the launch we were thrilled to have a super quick retweet by Craig Newmark of Craigslist and Craig Connects, who is a big proponent of open data and technology for social causes. And on launch day, here’s a sampling of the awesome tweets that reached hundreds of thousands of people:

Some key organizations contributed significantly to the challenge’s outreach on launch day, with the Case Foundation leading the way:

It’s always fantastic to get smart suggestions from the experts out there, and here is one from Lucy Bernholz:

We’ve promoted other challenges in the past, such as Apps for Communities, supported by the FCC and the Knight Foundation, and were extremely grateful for support from #opengov and #gov20 proponents. So in that vein it was fantastic to get a retweet from @GovFresh:

From left to right, we have some of the challenge’s team members with new friends … Daniel Tunkelang (Principal Data Scientist at LinkedIn), Kristen Cambell (Chief Program Officer at the National Conference on Citizenship), Michael Silberman (Global Director of Digital Innovation at Greenpeace), Jake Brewer (Chief Strategy Officer at Fission Strategy), and Adriana Dakin (Senior Strategist at Fission Strategy).